My oh my, how time does fly...

Looking at the date of my last entry I realized I was tardy in updating the Frog Blog. So here we are, just after 4/20 day, my most favoritist holiday ever. No Hallmark crap saturating everything, nothing to buy anyone and celebrating with some nice fat bowls of the Goddess in plant form and some nice munchies for afterward. What's not to love about such a wonderful holiday?

So here at the frog pond we have Mr. Tadpole working on his arcade projects and various gaming diversions. The cats think they are starving(despite having full food bowls) and specialize in giving out hurty punishing love. And I am trying to plan meals and distract myself. My little brother, We'll call him CatLover, moved to Fairbanks Alaska two years ago. He had purchased a spot of land out in the middle of nowhere, by Iskgiza lake specifically, and he has been working towards his ultimate goal of living the mountain man life on his property. Today he is closer to ever before, ready to take his boat out on the Tanana River, and I am simultaneously very excited for him and very very upset that I won't get to talk to him again until next November at the earliest. CatLover and I are (were?) very close and him living in Alaska was hard enough when I could call him up once a week and chat, the thought of not being able to even talk to him for months and months make my eyes spout big leaks and that makes it hard to see to type so I'm going to go on to my other current activity, planning meals.

Mr. Tadpole and I are foodies. We love our food, Asian, Greek, Mexican, Mediterranean, just regular old hearty home cooking and more. We love to make our favorite restaurant meals at home and try new foods and cuisines. So I decided in an effort to simplify our meals and hopefully save some on groceries, I would start planning meals. Now, I can't do the "We'll have this meal on this date" a week or two ahead. I don't know what my tummy will take nicely until the day of and we like spicy meals and I like to match meals to the weather, cold rainy days call for warm comfort food and hot days call for lighter fare. So the first time around I planned ten meals that I hoped would carry us through two weeks. I just hung the list on the fridge and decided each day which meal to make. It worked beautifully. The ten meals carried us three weeks. We did get a couple of items and made two unplanned meals in the third week, but that didn't bother me at all.

We had:
General Tso's chicken
BBQ meatballs
eggplant Parmesan
pizza
Penn Station style Italian subs
Cabbage and Bacon
Black Bean chorizo Burritos
Sheppard's Pie

And a couple of other meals that I can't recall at this moment(I lost the original list and my memory is crappy). We ended up making Lasagna too, because we only needed a couple of ingredients and that made so much that I put a smaller lasagna in the freezer and we had that last night for supper!

So hoping that once again 10-12 meals would take us three weeks between major shopping trips I started on a Master List for our favorite meals(with recipes I can look at easily) and made the second list of meals and we are two meals into it so far.

On the menu at the frog pond for this go around is:
~4/17 Frito Pie, hubby made this meal, nuclear strength chili, fritos, onions and cheddar cheese all baked together. It was good, but a little spicier then my tummy appreciated.
~4/18 Ratatouille- really awesome, it was really lovely, a baking dish piled high with veggies and cheese. We loved this, hubby told me three times how good it was!


Gyros
Rubens
Stuffed peppers
General Tso’s chicken (we love and adore this meal)
Vegetable soup
Chicken hot wings w/ blue cheese dip
Cincinnati Chili dogs and chili 5 way
Enchiladas
Nachos

The fresh veggies pose something of an issue, so I'm trying to make the stuff that calls for fresh veggies in the first week or so or put of buying them if I think we won't get to the meal in the next two weeks. It's one of the kinks I hope to work out. Another kink this week was I have a list of stuff I forgot to put on the list that I need :P. It's a challenge but it's being a ton of fun and I hope as I go on, things will get easier. They have to get easier, right? Just lie to me if you have to :) Thanks for reading and bright blessings!